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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much would cost to have the actual card reader that's seen in shops around

Oh by the way, Square's market is limited. The USA still uses primarily the unsafe magnetic stripe for payments, and even Canada is phasing out its use (in Interac at least)

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This is a good point. Surely Square have a plan for when America finally joins the present decade and adopts EMV/Chip and PIN? Or are they hoping to bootstrap pure mobile payments as an alternative? I don't see a competitive advantage in the latter scenario when PayPal already have a system with photo verification rolling out here in the UK.

Square's expansion in Canada last year doesn't appear to have gone anywhere meaningful. It's not just Interac; all cards are now Chip based. Credit Cards still also have the swipe but it's mainly used for cross-boarder shopping. It's been years since I've seen a card swiped in Canada that wasn't from an American tourist. Finally, Interac debit cards dominate the Canadian POS scene and the are Chip only and so won't work with Square any time soon.

If Square can't even meaningfully make inroads into Canada, I highly doubt they will be able to make inroads into anywhere else. But, we'll see...

chip is becoming more popular in the us now too

Mandatory as of October 2015 next year actually.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2014/01/28/america...

Not mandatory, just (barely) incentivized starting in 2015. You'll see non-EMV cards and terminals around for probably another decade.

This is highly doubtful. The fact that merchants take on all fraud risk from a fake card present transaction is very high incentive. I have friends in Canada that own retail stores and they said that fraud has dropped to almost zero because of EMV. There are ways to scam it, by pretending that the chip doesn't work and have the cashier swipe it, but if the cashier swipes it instead of using the pin, they get in trouble because the merchant loses money.

So I bet you'll see very quick adoption, within a couple of years max.

Big box stores are already moving towards it, with Target (surprise! surprise!) leading the way. Mom-and-Pop shops will probably not be happy about replacement costs, but they're apparently a diminishing market force anyways.

Experience from other places that switched to EMV shows that this incentive is large enough to have a rather quick adoption. Yes, there are some niches where non-EMV terminals stick around - those that are low-volume and feel immune to fraud; but all common stores seem to switch quickly as otherwise all fraudsters focus on those who haven't switched yet, and low-margin business can't afford losing that money.

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